As a charter member of the federal "do not call" list, the number of these "junk" calls that I get is outrageous. More than once, I've wondered where the prerecorded portions end and the human begins. Perhaps your caller was referring to preprinted scripts for all the answers ... or perhaps the technology haa advanced to the point of carrying on a "conversation". The implications of that possibility are terrifying: unlimited junk calls.

You used to have to go over a satellite link to get a pause that long. Now you just need a bad Voice over IP link, where the software has put in a really long latency buffer. He's probably just doing VoIP over a slow part of the Internet on the other side of the planet, without any handling of Quality of Service.